Narcotweets: Reporting on the Mexican Drug War using Social Media

Tuesday, July 10, 12:30 pmWasserstein Hall, Room 3019, Harvard Law SchoolRSVP required for those attending in person via the form belowThis event will be archived on our site shortly after.

In the last few years, the war among drug cartels and the Mexican
authorities has intensified. It is a brutal war that has claimed the
lives of many innocent people. Citizens, using Social Media have
organized a communication network reporting daily on the dangerous zones
of their cities. How did it start and how effective are they? In this
presentation we analyze the information sharing practices of people
living in cities central to the Mexican Drug War. We will describe the
content, volume, and network structures of a microblogging corpus from
several cities afflicted by this war. First, we will describe how
citizens use social media to alert each other and comment on the
violence that plagues their communities. Then we will examine how a
handful of citizens aggregate and disseminate information from social
media, many of whom are anonymous. We present our published and ongoing
research (jointly with Eni Mustafaraj) on this phenomenon that we hope will expand our understanding
of self-organized civic media efforts along with some of the challenges
that these might face.

Bios

Andrés Monroy-Hernández
is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at
Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His main
areas of research are social computing and social media. He is
particularly interested in the design and study of online collaboration,
communities for creative expression and civic engagement. His work has
been featured in the New York Times, CNN, Wired, and has received awards
from Ars Electronica, and the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning
Competition. He was formerly a student at the MIT Media Lab and at the
Tec de Monterrey in Mexico.

Panagiotis "Takis" Metaxas
is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and
Sciences Program at Wellesley College. Currently, he is a Visiting
Scholar and Affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and
Society at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from
Dartmouth and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and at the Sydney
University, Australia. His research interests are currently in Social
Computing, Propagation of information and misinformation in cyberspace
(including Web Spam) and Cognitive Hacking. His current project,
aims to create semi-automatic tools that will help users evaluate the
trustworthiness of the information they receive from Social Media.